Cafe du Nord
San Francisco, CA
24 April 2009

I’ve got no problem with languid. Some of my best friends are languid. But when it’s all languid, all the time…

Cryptacize is layers of fuzzy guitars, fuzzy keyboard and long, drawn out vocals. Even the faster songs had a relaxed, not-in-a-real-rush quality about them.

Mind you, my favorite band is The New Year, a band that has a reputation for incredibly down-tempo and slow-building songs. But there always seems a kind of subtle urgency to their music. Cryptacize is just altogether too relaxed for me. Perhaps that says more about me than it does them.

Their music is like some kind of loungy roots rock. Not hard on the ears, but also not very interesting. Perhaps the most interesting part of the set was the introduction for one of their songs:

“This next song is called Blue Tears. It’s about mental illness.”

I did what only seemed logical – I let out a subdued, diminutive “whoo-hoo!”